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Bill Clinton's Inaugural Speech Analysis

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1.0 INTRODUCTION
Chilton and Schaffner (2002:2) mention that political activity does not exist without the use of language and language constitute a great proportion of the political activities held. The relationship between language and politics stems from the fact that language can be thought of as a resource which is drawn up on to achieve socio-political goals. For the current assignment my partner and I are doing, we choose five inaugural speeches from five different presidents of America. Inaugural speech is the first speech made by a President at a ceremony which is also called the inauguration. This word is highly associated with Presidents, but it can apply to any kind of official occasion or function. Language has become a very important …show more content…

George W. Bush’ Inauguration Speech The American Presidency Project 1592 20th January 2001
4. Bill Clinton’s Inauguration Speech American renewal 1598 20th January 1993
5. George H. W. Bush’ Inauguration Speech Moment Rich With Promise 2320 20th January 1989

The study focuses only on inaugural speeches where we think it is interesting to find out the types of metadiscourse markers used by the presidents and the frequency used. The inaugural speeches were selected from four former presidents of America, which are George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and the current president of the United States, Donald Trump. All five of them are chosen because they are the latest person to hold the position of the Presidents of America.
The data in this study were taken from the internet in the textual text form of the transcriptions. The corpus of this study comprised of 9338 words altogether. In order to explore the distribution of interpersonal metadiscourse markers used in the speeches, a manual corpus analysis and corpus analysis using lexical software called Antconc was carried out. The corpus were examined for all instances of interactional metadiscourse markers listed by Hyland …show more content…

49)” and “the writer’s efforts to control the level of personality in a text and establish a suitable relationship to his or her data, arguments, and audience (Hyland, 2004, p. 139)”, entails the following five groups of markers.
The types of interactional metadiscourse includes hedges, boosters, attitude marker, self mention and engagement

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